The Storm Before Atlanta (15 page)

Dulcie thought of what Bill had said. She ought to leave him and help those who could be saved. She knew gut-shot soldiers couldn’t.

But she was free. Did she have to obey Bill just because he was white? No, she did not. She made her own decision. She leaned down and put her hand on his shoulder. “Come on,” she said. “The dressing station is this way.”

Nobody working at the dressing station had gone to sleep the night before, and Dulcie had only eaten a small piece of salt beef that Seth had shoved into her hands. He’d given her a hardtack cracker, too, but she hadn’t been able to make a dent in it. Now it was afternoon, and No-Joke came in, helping a man from the 107th.

Dulcie had had several years of medical experience
since the day before, and she saw at once that this man could not be saved. He was still almost walking, in a dazed sort of way, but the front of his blue fatigue blouse was dark with a spreading bloodstain and the look in his eyes was blank and distant. No-Joke half guided, half carried him along.

Dulcie went out to help. She didn’t tell No-Joke the man should be left for those who could be saved. Together they guided him toward the tent.

“All right, Jerome,” No-Joke was saying. “All right there. You’ll be all right.”

Things had quieted down a little. No-Joke reached up and ducked Jerome’s head down as they stepped into the tent, and Dr. Flood rose wearily to meet them. He shot Dulcie an accusing look, and Dulcie understood it to mean
Why did you bring me this one?

But she pretended not to understand, and went out of the tent with No-Joke.

“Is there any water?” said No-Joke.

“Over here,” said Dulcie, leading him to one of the buckets she’d found time to haul up from the river. She watched him kneel and drink, straight out of the bucket because there was no dipper handy. There had been one, but Dulcie had taken it over to the tree where the men who couldn’t be helped lay, when she had found time to give them a drink of water.

When he had drunk he sat down wearily on the ground. He looked exhausted, and Dulcie knew how that
felt. His face was blackened with gunpowder, especially around the mouth from biting cartridges open.

In the distance the rifles crackled, and Dulcie and No-Joke both looked toward the front lines. “We’re not in it right now,” said No-Joke. “We’ve been in it, and Jerome Newton was hit.” He nodded toward the tent.

“Is Jeremy all right?” said Dulcie.

“The drummer boy? Yes, he’s fine. He got lost in the woods, but he found his way out.”

Dulcie nodded, glad to hear this.

“How’s the medical work suiting you, Dulcie?”

“All right,” said Dulcie, not really thinking about whether it suited her or not. It needed doing; she did it.

“Do you reckon you want to be a medic, now that you’re free?”

“I don’t know, sir,” said Dulcie. No-Joke’s intense eyes bothered her. She wasn’t used to people taking such an interest in her.

“I have a sister about your age. Look.” No-Joke reached into his fatigue blouse and pulled out a small tintype.

Dulcie took the metal photograph. She saw four white people, all looking rather like No-Joke—a middle-aged man and woman, a girl of about nine, and a young woman of about eighteen. The two women both had No-Joke’s narrow, hollow-cheeked face and expression of burning intensity.

“That was a couple years ago. She’s eleven now. Her
name’s Hattie. My parents mean her for a teacher, but I don’t know if she wants to be one.”

“Oh,” said Dulcie.

“You have to do the work you’re meant for, the work you’re born for, even if they tell you you’re born for something else. Even if you’re a girl.”

Dulcie nodded, again uncomfortable with No-Joke’s fervor, which she saw reflected in the photograph. “Is this your whole family, then?”

No-Joke pointed with his pinky. “My ma and pa. They’re abolitionists too.”

“Who’s the young mis—the young lady?”

No-Joke looked away. “Oh—my other sister. Eliza.”

From his tone Dulcie could tell there was something wrong about this sister. They didn’t get along, maybe. Maybe she had married someone No-Joke didn’t approve of. Or maybe she wasn’t an abolitionist. Aunt Betsy back on the farm always said it was sad when families fell out.

“How come you’re not in the picture?”

No-Joke looked away. “Oh, it was taken after I left.”

Dulcie figured she was right—No-Joke had quarreled with his sister, and maybe his whole family. She flipped the photo over and saw there was writing on the back.

“Can you read?”

“No, sir.”

No-Joke sighed. “Of course. It’s illegal to teach slaves to read in Georgia, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir. But some can read,” she reassured him. “Not
many, but some. Willie on our place could read. I mean, he probably still can. They sold him away.”

“We’re going to need thousands of schools when this is over,” No-Joke said. “Thousands and thousands of schools for freedmen.”

“When this is over,” said Dulcie, “I want to go and find my ma and pa.”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

No-Joke sighed again and got painfully to his feet. “I’m going to check on Jerome before I go back to my company.”

He went into the tent and came out again a moment later, shaking his head. Jerome hadn’t made it. Dulcie could’ve told No-Joke he wouldn’t.

FOURTEEN

T
HE FIRING WENT ON UP AND DOWN THE LINE
through the second evening. Some of it sounded miles away to the south. Jeremy had never realized before how big a battle could be—how much land it could cover. The battle was bigger than Syracuse, probably. The last distant cannon fire died away around midnight. In the morning the firing did not begin again, and Jeremy and his messmates waited for orders to come. Jeremy wasn’t as restless as he had been before the battle. He knew now that you had to wait your turn to go in. You had to wait for orders. Their turn would come.

The morning dribbled away and still no orders came. Around ten a.m. a soldier came along whom Jeremy knew vaguely by sight, one of the westerners. Jeremy saw from his insignia that he was from Wisconsin.

“Any news?” Lars greeted him.

“No more battle today, boys. The Rebs have absquatulated.”

“They flew the coop?” Nicholas said.

“Dusted off in the night! Isn’t that just like a Reb.”

“Just when we were starting to have fun.”

Everyone seemed very lighthearted, and Jeremy felt that way himself. Maybe not so much because the Rebs had run but because they were
gone
, and didn’t need to be fought anymore right now.

“We were too many for them,” said Jeremy. “Can’t no Reb stand up to us. The Reb hasn’t been born who can stand up to the 107th New York.”

“Did you see how many of them were surrendering?”

The man frowned. “Twenty-three of them surrendered to us. We took ’em prisoner, then we asked them if they remembered Fort Pillow, and then we used ’em up.”

There was a moment’s silence, in which the man looked at them all defiantly.

“You what?” said Dave.

“You can’t do that,” said Nicholas.

“They did the same to our men,” said the man. “Or don’t you remember Fort Pillow?”

Dave shifted uncomfortably. “Well, those were colored prisoners that the Rebs killed at Fort Pillow.”

“They were American soldiers,” said No-Joke. “Union soldiers.”

“So that makes it all right to kill Reb prisoners?” said Lars. “That’s too thin, even for you, No-Joke.”

Jeremy listened to this in confusion. He had grown up with war, he had known war since he was eight years old,
he had studied war and cherished it, and he knew its rules. You didn’t kill your prisoners. And yet here was a man standing in front of them claiming to have done just that, and not appearing to feel particularly bad about it.

“It’s
not
all right,” Jeremy told him. “You can’t kill prisoners that have surrendered to you.”

“You got that right, Little Drummer Boy,” said Lars.

“Someone’s got to teach those Rebs a lesson!” said No-Joke. “They slaughtered the colored soldiers who surrendered at Fort Pillow! They didn’t even see ’em as human beings. Somebody’s gotta teach ’em.”

“Can’t teach nobody nothing by killing ’em,” said Dave.

“That’s the trouble with fanatics like you, No-Joke,” said Lars. “Nothing matters to you but your cause. You don’t care about the war.”

“Care about it!” said No-Joke angrily. Red spots of color rose in his sunken cheeks. “Care about it! You, sir, have no idea!”

The man from Wisconsin frowned down at them in their trench. “I don’t see why you’re acting like you’re some pumpkins. You’d of done the same thing yourself. Especially if other people was doing it. I talked to one fella, him and his pardners caught a Reb that had Fort Pillow tattooed on his arm, and they tore him to pieces.”

Fascinated, Jeremy turned over in his head the idea of “tore him to pieces.” Then he thought of his friend Charlie. What if someone were to treat Charlie that way? What
if they
had
treated Charlie that way? What if Charlie had been one of the twenty-three prisoners this man had killed?

“If we don’t show these Rebs what war really means, they’re never going to surrender,” said No-Joke. “And I know General Sherman agrees with me about that!”

“Big of him,” said Nicholas.

“So do you think a man who was shooting at you five seconds ago, just because he stops and waves a white flag, you suddenly aren’t allowed to shoot back?” said Jack.

“Yep. That’s exactly what I think,” said Nicholas.

“
Were
they shooting at you five seconds ago?” Dave asked.

The soldier from Wisconsin didn’t answer.

“If he’s surrendered he ain’t gonna shoot you no more, and shooting him is flat-out murder and nothing else,” said Lars firmly.

“I don’t need to stand here and be slangwhanged at by no paper-collar soldiers from back East,” said the soldier from Wisconsin, and went on his way.

“I hate when them westerners call us paper-collar soldiers,” said Nicholas. “I never wore a paper collar in my life.”

“Me neither,” said No-Joke.

Dave frowned, still puzzling over what the western soldier had said. “I guess there are two sides to the story.”

Nicholas laughed. “I told you. There are hundreds of sides to every story.”

Dave, as usual, looked hurt that Nicholas disagreed
with him. Jeremy tried to imagine what Nicholas would have been like as a schoolteacher. He couldn’t. All the teachers he’d ever had were strict, frowning, wielding a hickory stick to keep the students in order. Nicholas was relaxed, and laughed all the time. But then, most of the soldiers seemed to laugh all the time.

Maybe it was what war did to a man.

“Your eyes look different,” said Jeremy to Dulcie. “You’ve seen the elephant.”

The Secesh had abandoned Resaca, leaving behind entrenchments and many dead Rebels. The surgeons and their assistants were patching up men to be sent back by train to Union hospitals in Tennessee, now that the railroad was secured again. Just before what Jeremy now knew had been the Battle of Resaca, a contingent of the Union Army had managed to capture Buzzard’s Roost, through which the railroad ran.

The train ride would be long and slow, and every jolt would endanger the injured soldiers’ lives. Jeremy and Dulcie were cutting pine boughs to lay on the boxcar floors, to protect the men from the worst of the bumps. Above the pine boughs they planned to put a layer of straw, and then they would cover the straw with whatever blankets they could find.

To Jeremy Dulcie looked very different. She was still wearing a Union fatigue blouse and a skirt made of flour
sacks, which was now stained and crusted with mud and blood. Her face looked older, though. Her eyes still stabbed like bayonets, but they seemed to know things now that they hadn’t before.

“I have seen the elephant,” Dulcie agreed. “In the dressing station, behind the lines. The elephant was there.”

“Do my eyes look different?” Jeremy asked.

Dulcie didn’t answer for a minute, and Jeremy felt her scrutiny as he went on chopping at a pine bough, right where it met the tree.